If you are active on Instagram and people are following you, there is a way to turn it into a side business. And you don’t have to be an extremely popular person with hundreds of thousands of followers to become an influencer. In reality, as little as one thousand followers is enough to successfully make money on Instagram, so it’s fair to say that anyone can do this.
The follower count is not the only number you should refer to, as there are other important metrics. Actually, engagement is probably even more crucial when it comes to getting paid for your content on Instagram. If you manage to gather an audience that is very engaged in your content, even though not that big, the business will be more than happy to make a partnership with you.
So if you already have an audience or just looking forward to getting a decent amount of followers, make sure to check out this guide on how to monetize Instagram. It will give you a great perspective on what you should expect.
Different Ways to Get Paid
When someone talks about making money on Instagram, the very first thought on everyone’s mind is paid partnerships with various brands. It’s pretty self-explaining – brand pays you for the opportunity to appear on your feed and get additional visibility. If you are a nano influencer with just a couple of thousands of followers, you are more likely to get free products than actually get paid for your endorsement. Again, engagement is very important, because it directly correlates to the number of users that are going to notice sponsored content.
However, this is definitely not the only way to make money on Instagram – you have plenty of other options in your hands. You can become an affiliate and promote products/services. This way you won’t have to actually participate in the process of managing customers and delivering goods, but you will be paid for every single sale that was made because of you.
Obviously, being an affiliate partner isn’t nearly as profitable as selling something by yourself. You can set up a website and generate leads using your audience. This will take much more time and maybe some money that you will need to invest in order to get this thing going, but the revenue might be much higher.
When you are thinking of a product or service that you could sell, first of all, think of your audience and what might be appealing to it. If you are uploading posts about make-up and dresses and your audience is mostly women, selling used car parts isn’t the best fit, right? Ideally, your products should match the content you are posting. Otherwise, you might be disappointed by conversion rates.
Lastly, you can sell things directly on Instagram without even having a website or e-shop. There is an easier way to do that – you can upload your products to Facebook, link the Facebook account with your Instagram account and sell them directly on Instagram.
Last year Instagram introduced a new feature, that lets you tag products in photos. By tapping or clicking on the tag, the user will be taken directly to your Facebook profile where the item can be purchased. Keep in mind, that both your Facebook and Instagram accounts need to be set as a “business account” in order to do that. Usability is one of the most important things when it comes to online shopping, so just clicking on the tag and being directed to the page where you can purchase an item is probably the most convenient method to do this.
Do not limit yourself to only one of those making money on Instagram techniques – they all can be combined. You can be a partner of some brand and promote your own products at the same time. Just remember to keep a healthy ratio between advertisements and organic content. No one would like to see advertisements all day long, your audience could turn away real quick.
What Income You Can Expect
Now when you know that there are different options to make money on Instagram and it’s not that hard, you are probably wondering how much you could possibly earn. Well, there are a lot of different factors that come into play, but the number of followers and engagement are still the most important metrics.
If you are affiliated with a business, you can expect about 2-10% of every sold product. So if a thousand of people notice your post that suggests buying something, statistically around 1% will actually convert into real customers. That means you would make 10 sales. Let’s say a product costs $40 and you get 5% for every sale, so that would convert into $20 for a single post.
That’s just a brief example of what you could expect, those numbers are likely to be different due to a number of factors.